Next day after I was assigned my new role at Enova, some of my friends asked me, or rather stated: now you won’t have time for programming! How do you feel about it? Won’t you miss the real work? And my old friends probably do remember that I used to say: I do not want to be a manager exactly for that reason – that I do not want to give away the actual work.

So – why in the world I did it?..

First, I didn’t quite give away the “normal work” entirely, I just program less than I used to. Second is more interesting. Yes, I love to produce “the real stuff” that works. But even more important, or at least equally important is to see the results of your work implemented in the “real life”, to see your stuff working. And very often, when you do not have any authority it’s difficult to convince people to execute your way, even when they trust you and believe you, that “your way is the right way”.

In other words, as one of the OMD applicants put it in her essay, “I’ve realized, that if I do not want to play by other people’s rules, I need to become a person, who makes the rules”. Or, yet another way to say the same thing – the way I said to one of my former co-workers: I have to do “big things” in order to be able to do my “small things”.

Or yet another way to say it: my new position gives me a way to make “real things” actually real!